In Cloud Computing This Week [Nov 26th 2021]

With Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling’s new predictive scaling policy, you can now use custom metrics to predict the EC2 instance capacity needed by an Auto Scaling group. Predictive scaling proactively increases the capacity of an Auto Scaling group to meet predicted demand. For workloads that experience recurring, steep demand changes, predictive scaling can help improve your application’s responsiveness without having to overprovision capacity, resulting in lower EC2 costs. Custom metrics are useful when the predefined metrics (CPU Utilization, Network I/O, and ALB Request Count) are not sufficient to capture the load on your application. Previously, you could only use custom metrics with step scaling and target tracking, but you can now use them with predictive scaling as well.

Amazon Managed Grafana announces new data source plugins for Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift, enabling customers to query, visualize, and alert on their Athena and Redshift data from Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces. Amazon Managed Grafana now also supports CloudFlare, Zabbix, and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring data sources as well as the Geomap panel visualization and open source Grafana version 8.2.

Amazon QuickSight now supports dataset versioning, which allows dataset owners to understand historical changes within a dataset, preview a specific version, or revert back to a previous version if needed. Dataset versions can be viewed and tracked via the UI, allowing dataset owners to view versions and switch to a specific version via UI. Dataset Versions gives dataset authors the confidence to experiment with their content, knowing that their older versions are available and that they easily can revert back to it when required.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for Azure SQL Managed Instance as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now migrate data live from Azure SQL Managed Instance to any valid supported target  with minimal downtime.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now offers Identity Resolution that is designed to automatically detect similar customer profiles by comparing name, email address, phone number, date of birth, and address. For example, two or more profiles with spelling mistakes, such as "John Doe" and "Jhn Doe," can be detected as belonging to the same customer "John Doe" using clustering and matching machine learning (ML) algorithms. Once a group of profiles are detected to be similar, admins can configure how profiles should be merged together by setting up consolidation rules  through AWS management console or APIs .

This week, AWS announced three new enhancements for AWS IoT SiteWise that make it easier for customers to collect data from industrial equipment at scale. The new enhancements reduce the number of steps required to ingest equipment data to the cloud, and add flexibility for customers modeling their physical operations using AWS IoT SiteWise asset models and assets.

Amazon QuickSight now supports connectivity to Exasol, a high-performance, in-memory, MPP database designed for analytics. QuickSight’s new data connector allows business users to directly connect, analyze and report on the data in Exasol using a live connection, or import data from Exasol into QuickSight’s SPICE in-memory engine for scaling access to 1000s of users. 

Amazon Redshift support for GEOGRAPHY data type is now available for spatial analytics. GEOGRAPHY data type is used in queries requiring higher precision results for spatial data with geographic features that can be represented with a spheroid model of the Earth and referenced using latitude and longitude as spatial coordinate system.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Enterprise On-Ramp, a new Support tier designed for production and business-critical needs to help customers that are starting their cloud journey and need expert guidance to grow and optimize on cloud. With Enterprise On-Ramp, customers can solve cloud-related challenges with 24/7 access to AWS experts whether by phone or live chat, share their screen, and get support to improve issue resolution and eliminate the frustration of back-and-forth emails.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Data sharing now adds several performance enhancements including result caching, and concurrency scaling allowing you to support broader set of analytics applications and meet critical performance SLAs when querying shared data.

Starting this week, your IPv6 AWS resources in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can use NAT64 (on AWS NAT Gateway) and DNS64 (on Amazon Route 53 Resolver) to communicate with IPv4 services. As you transition your workloads to IPv6 networks, they would continue to need access to IPv4 network and services. With NAT64 and DNS64, your IPv6 resources can communicate with IPv4 services within the same VPC or connected VPCs, your on-premises networks, or the Internet.

EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug  big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. This week, AWS are excited to announce two new capabilities in EMR Studio. First, you can now more easily execute python scripts directly from the EMR Studio Notebooks. Second, you can execute other dependent Jupyter notebooks directly from a notebook in EMR Studio. Earlier, both of these capabilities required manually copying these files from EMR Studio to the EMR Cluster. 

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. The Amazon Chime SDK now offers machine learning (ML) based echo reduction to help improve audio experiences. Acoustic echoes disrupt meetings or conference calls when the sound played by the loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone and it circulates back into the call. The new ML-based echo reduction capability is designed to reduce acoustic echoes and preserve voice quality during double-talk conditions, when two or more people speak at the same time.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Amazon Translate now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so you can securely initiate API calls to Amazon Translate from within your VPC and without using public IPs. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network, significantly simplifying your internal network architecture. You no longer need to use an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices or firewall proxies to connect to Amazon Translate.

AWS Proton now allows customers to sync their Proton templates from a git repository. Platform teams can create AWS Proton templates based on AWS CloudFormation and Terraform templates uploaded to a git repository. AWS Proton is designed to automatically sync and create a new version when changes are made and committed to the git repository. With this new feature, platform and development teams can eliminate manual steps and and reduce the chance for human error.

AWS Proton now supports the definition of infrastructure in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and the provisioning of infrastructure using Terraform Open Source through a git-based workflow. Platform teams define AWS Proton templates using Terraform modules, and AWS Proton leverages the customer-managed Terraform automation to provision or update the infrastructure. Customers can use Terraform as their infrastructure definition and provisioning tool, and AWS Proton will ensure that modules are used consistently and kept up to date.

Amazon DynamoDB now helps you meet regulatory compliance and business continuity requirements through enhanced backup features, including copying on-demand backups cross-account and cross-Region, cost allocation tagging for backups, and transitioning backups to cold storage. In addition, backups managed through AWS Backup are now stored in the AWS Backup vault, which allows you to encrypt and secure your backups by using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key that is independent from your DynamoDB table encryption key.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) now supports new instance sizes within the Amazon EC2 compute-optimized, GPU, and dense SSD storage instance types that support EFA. Until now, EFA could be enabled for select bare-metal instances or for the largest instance size that support EFA. Starting today, you can associate EFA with additional sizes within Amazon C5, G4, and I3 instance types. By enabling EFA for smaller instance sizes that match the performance requirements of your application, you can lower costs. 

Now on EC2 Image Builder, AWS customers can share their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with AWS Organizations and Organizational Units (OUs)  in the image distribution phase of their build process. As their organization structure changes, customers no longer have to manually update AMI permissions for individual AWS accounts in their organization. Customers can create OUs within AWS Organizations and manage AMI permissions for AWS accounts within those OUs.

AWS Managed Templates for IoT Jobs , a new feature of AWS IoT Device Management now gives you the ability to deploy common remote operations to fleets of IoT devices directly from the AWS IoT Console, with no incremental code, and in a standardized manner. Instead of having to manually define your remote operations in a JSON Job Document, you can select from a range of pre-built remote actions, provide relevant inputs, and quickly deploy them to your IoT fleets.

AWS this week announced AWS WAF Captcha to help block unwanted bot traffic by requiring users to successfully complete challenges before their web request are allowed to reach AWS WAF protected resources. Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is commonly used to distinguish between robotic and human visitors to prevent activity like web scraping, credential stuffing, and spam. You can configure AWS WAF rules to require WAF Captcha challenges to be solved for specific resources that are frequently targeted by bots such as login, search, and form submissions. You can also require WAF Captcha challenges for suspicious requests based on the rate, attributes, or labels generated from AWS Managed Rules, such as AWS WAF Bot Control or the Amazon IP Reputation list. WAF Captcha challenges are simple for humans while remaining effective against bots. WAF Captcha includes an audio version and is designed to meet WCAG  accessibility requirements.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Google Cloud SQL for MySQL as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from Google Cloud SQL for MySQL to any AWS DMS supported targets .

AWS App Runner now supports GitHub Actions  to build and deploy applications. GitHub Actions provide a way to implement complex orchestration and CI/CD functionality directly in GitHub by initiating a workflow on any GitHub event. If you have your source code in a GitHub repository, you can use GitHub Actions to enable App Runner to build a Docker image based on the language runtime and to deploy your application based on the generated image. For supported runtimes on App Runner, refer to the documentation . If you already have a container image of your application in a GitHub repository, you can use GitHub Actions to directly use the image to deploy your application on App Runner.

Improved cold query performance is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Elastic Beanstalk now supports AWS Graviton-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types. AWS Graviton is an arm64-based processor built by Amazon that provides up to 40% better price-performance over a comparable x86-based processor. AWS Graviton on Elastic Beanstalk enables customers to benefit from the superior price-performance of arm64-based processors along with the ease-of-use of Elastic Beanstalk.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. This week, AWS are excited to announce automatic language identification for streaming transcriptions. Until now, you were required to manually identify the dominant language in order to use Transcribe streaming APIs. You can now simply start streaming and Transcribe will detect the dominant language from the speech signal and generate transcriptions in the identified language. 

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks to interactively explore datasets and build ML models. The notebooks come pre-configured with deep learning environments for AWS-optimized TensorFlow and PyTorch to quickly get started with building models. Starting today you can access two new environments for TensorFlow 2.6 and PyTorch 1.8.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. With live transcriptions, developers can include subtitles in meetings and create transcripts using Amazon Transcribe or Amazon Transcribe Medical. Using the service-side integration between Amazon Chime SDK and your Amazon Transcribe account, application builders can now help identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) from transcripts. Builders can also utilize custom language models to help improve the transcription accuracy for their use cases.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in two additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (London).

Amazon Redshift RA3 Reserved Instance (RI) migration feature is now available in the Amazon Redshift Console, CLI and API to help migrate your DS2 RI clusters to RA3 RI clusters.

You can now enable one-click single sign-on to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances running Microsoft Windows (Amazon EC2 Windows Instances) with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO). You can connect your instances with users from AWS SSO or any AWS SSO supported identity provider , such as Okta, Ping, and OneLogin. This makes it easy for you to access your instance desktops from anywhere without having to enter your credentials multiple times or having to configure remote access client software. Now, you can use your existing corporate usernames, passwords, and multi-factor authentication devices to securely access your Amazon EC2 Windows Instances, eliminating the use of shared administrator credentials. In addition, you have visibility into individual user actions which can be viewed in the Amazon EC2 Windows event log, making it easier to meet audit and compliance requirements.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now provides managed server-side encryption using SQS owned encryption keys (SSE-SQS) to protect sensitive data. SSE-SQS helps you build security-sensitive applications to support your encryption compliance and regulatory requirements. 

This week, AWS launched usability improvements for the navigation bar in the AWS Management Console . The improvements include a customizable favorites bar, updates to the services menu, and visual updates for consistency and accessibility. The new favorites bar appears when you have selected at least one service as a favorite in the services menu. It also supports an unlimited number of favorites that can be organized with drag and drop. The updated services menu groups services by category and provides an A to Z listing of all services. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables customers to quickly get started to monitor and debug their applications with traces and custom metrics using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). This feature allows Amazon ECS customers to use the console to enable metrics and traces collection, and then export to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and AWS X-Ray with just few clicks. This experience simplifies a multi-step manual process of configuring ADOT in task definitions, and enables customers to solve application availability and performance issues.

You can now use data tiering for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a lower cost way to scale your clusters to up to hundreds of terabytes of capacity. Data tiering provides a new price-performance option for Redis workloads by utilizing lower-cost solid state drives (SSDs) in each cluster node in addition to storing data in memory. It is ideal for workloads that access up to 20% of their overall dataset regularly, and for applications that can tolerate additional latency when accessing data on SSD.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now provides contact history and customer information together in unified customer profiles at no charge, helping contact center managers personalize the contact center experience. Previously, contact center managers needed to work with software development teams to build profiles of end customers and their contact history. Now, they can use Customer Profiles at no charge to automatically store Amazon Connect contact history in a customer-centric view along with customer information such as name, phone number, account number, and address. Agents can access Customer Profiles to provide more personalized customer service through either the out-of-the-box Amazon Connect agent application or through their company’s custom agent applications, enabling them to provide more personalized customer service. Contact center managers can also use the Customer Profiles contact block when designing contact flows to personalize and automate the contact center experience.

AWS IoT Core Device Advisor now supports the capability to run multiple test suites at the same time. Device Developers can use this capability to complete testing faster by testing multiple devices simultaneously. Developers can also test their devices more comprehensively by using new MQTT test cases such as a test to validate the device behavior when the device is disconnected from the server side. Device Advisor console also provides a new and simpler way for developers to quickly review and create an IAM role in few clicks, enabling developers to grant permissions to Device Advisor for connecting with AWS IoT Core on behalf of their test devices.

You can now set Amazon S3 Lifecycle rules to limit the number of versions of an object to retain to achieve greater storage savings, and to choose objects to move to other storage classes based on size to optimize your lifecycle transitions. S3 Lifecycle helps you optimize your storage costs by transitioning or expiring your objects as they get older or are replaced by newer versions. You can use these Lifecycle configurations for your whole bucket, or for a subset of your objects by filtering by prefixes, object tags, or object size.

Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers now support end-to-end connectivity with Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Clients can now connect to application and network load balancers and access backend applications over IPv6.

Amazon Lex now supports Amazon Polly  Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices for your bots, allowing your bots to respond to your users with richer, more expressive, and natural-sounding voices than standard Polly Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices. Polly NTTS voices deliver advanced improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. Amazon Lex is natively integrated with Amazon Polly for voice interactions. Until today, Lex developers could only configure bots to use Polly’s standard Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices. Starting today, you can configure bots built through Lex V2 APIs and console to use Polly NTTS voices for any language that supports an NTTS option to improve user experience and boost customer engagement.

AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors, is now generally available. AWS Graviton2 processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and Graviton2-powered Fargate delivers up to 40% improved price/performance at 20% lower cost over comparable Intel x86-based Fargate for a variety of workloads such as application servers, web services, high-performance computing, and media processing. This adds even more choice to help customers optimize performance and cost for running containerized workloads on Fargate’s serverless compute.

Amazon FinSpace now provides data management APIs that allow customers to work with data in their Amazon FinSpace environment using the AWS SDK and CLI. With these new APIs, customers can add steps to their automated workflows that manage their data resources in Amazon FinSpace. Using the new APIs, customers can create Amazon FinSpace datasets, load data using change sets, and create point-in-time views for analysis. 

Fleet Manager, a feature in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps IT Admins streamline and scale their remote server management processes, now enables a console-based management experience for Windows instances. This new feature provides customers a full graphical interface to setup secure connections to and manage Windows instances. You no longer need to install additional software, set up additional servers, or open direct inbound access to ports on the instance.

Amazon Connect now supports modules to simplify the creation and management of repeatedly used contact flow logic. Contact flow modules are a set of user defined blocks centrally managed in an Amazon Connect instance that can be referenced in multiple contact flows. For example, a customer may want to perform the same steps of identifying intent, authenticating the account number, and updating contact attributes across multiple different contact flows. With contact flow modules, the customer only has to build the contact flow logic once then reference the module in the applicable contact flows. Any time updates to a module are published, the changes will reflect directly in all the contact flows that reference the updated module. Modules feature access, editing, and publishing is enabled through the Amazon Connect console.

Starting this week, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows you to create IPv6-only subnets in your dual-stack VPCs and launch EC2 instances built on Nitro System  in these subnets. The launch of IPv6-only subnets allows customers to scale their deployments on AWS by not requiring any IPv4 addressing in the subnet. With a /64 IPv6 CIDR assignment to the subnet, it accommodates approximately 18 quintillion IP addresses for applications.

AWS Amplify is launching a developer preview of its expanded Notifications category for JavaScript. Powered by Amazon Pinpoint, this expansion allows developers to instrument in-app messaging to drive engagement and monetization.

Amazon Connect now provides two new APIs to archive/unarchive and delete contact flows. The new APIs provide a programmatic and flexible way to manage your library of contact flows at scale. For example, contact flows used only during certain times of the year can be archived when not in use and then unarchived when needed. You can now also delete a contact flow so it is no longer available for use. To learn more about the new APIs, see the API documentation .

You can now check whether a configuration change will require a blue/green deployment from the Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) console or using the Amazon OpenSearch Service APIs. With this new option, you can plan and make configuration changes that require a blue/green deployment when your cluster is not at its peak traffic.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Ability to share data across clusters that are in the same AWS account  and across accounts  is already available. Now sharing data across Redshift clusters in different AWS regions is available for preview. Cross-region data sharing preview is supported on all Redshift RA3 node types.

AWS Lambda now supports partial batch response for SQS as an event source. With this feature, when messages on an SQS queue fail to process, Lambda marks a batch of records in a message queue as partially successful and allows reprocessing of only the failed records. By processing information at a record-level instead of batch-level, AWS Lambda has removed the need of repetitive data transfer, increasing throughput and making Amazon SQS message queue processing more efficient. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and for PostgreSQL now supports a new Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database instances. This deployment option optimizes write transactions and is ideal when your workloads require additional read capacity, lower write transaction latency, more resilience from network jitter (which impacts the consistency of write transaction latency), and high availability and durability.

Amazon ElastiCache for supports Redis 6.2. ElastiCache for Redis 6.2 includes performance improvements for TLS-enabled clusters using x86 node types with 8 vCPUs or more or Graviton2 node types with 4 vCPUs or more. These enhancements are designed to improve throughput and reduce client connection establishment time by offloading encryption to other CPUs. With Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 6.2, you can also manage access to Pub/Sub channels with Access Control List (ACL) rules. For the full list of improvements in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 6.2 (enhanced), click here .

AWS Amplify announces GraphQL Transformer version 2, enabling developers to develop more feature-rich, flexible, and extensible GraphQL-based app backends even with minimal cloud expertise. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. With the GraphQL Transformer, developers can model their backend data model using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, and Amplify CLI automatically transforms the the schema into a fully functioning GraphQL API with its underlying cloud infrastructure.

Amazon Voice Focus, an industry-leading speech enhancement technology currently used for noise reduction in Amazon Chime SDK meetings, is now available packaged as an Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Machine Image (AMI). The Amazon Voice Focus AMI helps developers, media producers, and content creators reduce noise in real-time speech capture or archived speech recordings. It is a cloud component that application builders can insert into their streaming media and content production pipelines to help reduce unwanted sounds and deliver the speech that users want to be heard.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL - Compatible Edition major version 12. PostgreSQL 12  includes better management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, and many other additional features.

Starting this week, AWS customers can dynamically attach and detach Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes on their running Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Prior to today, customers attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances needed to reboot their instances for revised EBS configuration to be reflected within their macOS guest environments. Now with this capability, customers do not need to trigger an instance reboot and wait for it to complete when attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances.

This week, AWS CloudFormation StackSets  announces the capability to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set. This will let you create resources, applications or environments across your AWS Organization and AWS Regions efficiently. You can subsequently avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually.

This week, AWS are announcing the public preview of Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022), Amazon's new general purpose Linux for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run your cloud applications. Starting with AL2022, a new Amazon Linux major version will be available every two years and each version will be supported for five years. Customers will also be able to take advantage of quarterly updates via minor releases and use the latest software for their applications. Finally, AL2022 provides the ability to lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository giving customers control over how and when they absorb updates.

Amazon EventBridge expands support to all Regions, except for AWS GovCloud (US) and China, as a destination for its cross-Region event bus as a target functionality launched in April’2021 (initially launched with 3 destination Regions - US East (N. Virgina), US West (Oregon) and Europe(Ireland)). This will allow customers to consolidate events in one central Region from any Region. This makes it easier for customers to centralize their events for auditing and monitoring purposes or replicate events from source to destinations Regions to help synchronize data across Regions. 

Starting this week, Amazon Neptune announced the general availability of general-purpose T4g and memory-optimized R6g database instances powered by the AWS Graviton2 processor. AWS Graviton2-based instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances for a variety of workloads. Customers running graph workloads using Apache TinkerPop Gremlin , openCypher , or W3C SPARQL 1.1  query languages can expect to see significant improvements in query latency at a lower cost in comparison to x86-based instances of equivalent instance size.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports the AWS Graviton2-based T4g instance family in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Frankfurt), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Canada (Central), and mainland China (Ningxia, Beijing). Customers choose ElastiCache for workloads that require accelerated performance with microsecond latency and high throughput. T4g instances are ideal for running applications with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in usage.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now offers an option to securely connect to Amazon MSK clusters over the internet. By enabling public access, authorized clients external to a private Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can stream encrypted data in and out of specific Amazon MSK clusters. You can enable public access for MSK clusters at no additional cost, but standard AWS data transfer costs for cluster ingress and egress apply.

AWS Lambda has launched a new metric, OffsetLag, to monitor the performance of Amazon MSK, Self-managed Kafka, AmazonMQ, and RabbitMQ message queueing services. Up until now, Lambda users did not have visibility into how polling runs and had to increasingly rely on the Lambda support team to resolve delays in processing, leading to inefficiencies in data streaming. The OffsetLag metric is a measure of the total number of messages waiting in the message queue to be sent to the target Lambda function. This metric will provide transparency into the amount of data congestion in a message queue. Thus, developers can monitor the performance of events, set alarms and thresholds to check for undesirable congestion and quickly diagnose and solve inefficiencies in their data stream.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports creating backups locally on AWS Outposts with Amazon S3 support. You can create backups of your Amazon RDS databases running on AWS Outposts to the same Outpost or to the AWS Region of your Outpost, allowing you to maintain your data residency requirements while giving you flexibility for maintaining your data recovery solutions. CloudFormation support will be coming soon.

Amazon Redshift now scales write queries with Concurrency Scaling . Concurrency Scaling supports virtually unlimited concurrent users and concurrent queries, with consistently fast query performance. Now your write queries such as COPY, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE can run on transient Concurrency Scaling clusters when there is queueing.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today open-sourced the build scripts that Amazon ECS uses to build the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image  (AMI). These build scripts are now available on GitHub  as an open-source project under the Apache license 2.0. Customers can use these build scripts to build custom AMIs with security, monitoring, and compliance controls based on their organization’s requirements while using the same components as the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.

You can now manage AWS Step Functions workflows from the Amazon Athena console, making it easier to build scalable data processing pipelines, execute queries based on custom business logic, automate administrative and alerting tasks, and more.

Starting this week, Amazon EC2 M6i and C6i bare metal instances are available. M6i and C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 and C5 instances respectively, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). M6i instances are well suited for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments. C6i instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Kafka multi-topic with a single task. Using AWS DMS, you can now replicate multiple schemas from a single database to different Kafka topics using the same task. This eliminates the need to create multiple separate tasks in situations where many tables from the same source database need to be migrated to different Kafka topics.

Starting this week, AWS customers can run macOS Monterey (12.0.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Apple macOS Monterey is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. macOS Monterey supports running Xcode versions 13.0 and later, which include the latest SDKs for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a cloud storage analytics feature for organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity, now includes support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can now create a unified view of your operational health to monitor any of your S3 Storage Lens metrics alongside other application metrics using CloudWatch dashboards.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 R6i instances. Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as SQL and noSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases like SAP HANA, and real time big data analytics like Hadoop and Spark clusters.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Amazon ECS Exec for workloads running on Windows operating systems. Amazon ECS Exec, launched in March 2021, makes it easier for customers to troubleshoot errors, collect diagnostic information, interact with processes in containers during development, or get “break-glass” access to containers to debug critical issues encountered in production.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4 instances. T4g is the next generation burstable general-purpose DB instance type that provides a baseline level of CPU performance, with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. This instance type offers a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads.

Amazon Connect now supports custom contact attributes as search filters on the contact search page. You can now add up to 15 custom contact attributes to the search filter and use them to build your search queries. For example, if you have created “AgentLocation” as a custom contact attribute , you can now use it as a search criterium, and search for contacts handled by Agents based in “Seattle”, by specifying “Seattle” as the target value. To learn more, see the Contact Search documentation .

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processor. With CloudWatch Lambda Insights you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions.

Public preview refresh: Azure IoT Central REST API new and updated endpoints

IoT Central REST API now supports a series of new API endpoints that you can access through the 1.1-preview endpoint.

Private preview: Root cause analysis, new telemetry, & alerts for SAP NetWeaver in AMS

View root cause analysis (RCA) for SAP system unavailability caused by virtual machine or host outage and new telemetry for SAP NetWeaver in Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions (AMS).

Public preview: New SAP HANA telemetry in AMS

SAP HANA license status, delta merges, and more telemetry now available in Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions.

General availability of custom OpenID providers in App Service and Azure Functions

Support for authenticating clients of App Service and Azure Functions using OpenID Connect is now generally available.

In development: New planned datacenter region in Belgium (Belgium Central)

Microsoft has announced plans to bring a new datacenter region to Belgium, including Availability Zones.

General availability: Improved legends in IoT Central Analytics charts

Grouping by Device Name is now supported in IoT Central Analytics charts.

Public preview: Azure Virtual Machines DCasv5 and ECasv5-series now available 

New DCasv5 and ECasv5-series Azure Confidential Virtual Machines are available in public preview

Public preview: Node.js 16 in Azure Functions

Node.js 16.x is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Node.js runtime and includes features such as a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine.

Azure Site Recovery update rollup 59 is now generally available - November 2021

Information about the improvements and fixes provided in Update Rollup 59.